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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

Because the other side is the general informed consensus for which multiple sources are readily available for me to find. I have seen nothing to indicate this side, hence I'm asking for any evidence, because I don't see it. Either could potentially be correct, but I don't think they're equally probable.

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To the extent there is a consensus here, it's not an evidence-based one; it's entirely founded on untested statements made by people who have both a track record of lying and incentive to do so.

Demanding evidence from one party while accepting the word of the other is not even-handed.

And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence? Let's start by actually having evidence for "your side", then you can demand evidence from the other.

> And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence?

It's not. I have no idea how you got there.

The right thing is to seek evidence for both perspectives. This is ironically not rocket science. Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so, but especially don't pretend to sneering objectivity when you do so.

I got there because somebody asked for evidence for a certain viewpoint and you seemed to push back against this ask by suggesting that if you ask for evidence, you need to demand it from both sides. As if somebody failing to do that doesn't entitle them to any evidence from anybody.

> Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so

Exactly. That's why they asked for a citation. A response providing such citation is more appropriate than essentially saying "well you didn't ask for a citation from $other_side either".

That argument would be coherent if not for the fact that in this case, the commenter had scrolled past one unsupported set of statements, accepted them, then challenged the other set; that's not reasonable.

Accepting something without evidence and only challenging things that disagree with your evidence-less beliefs is the exact opposite of even-handed.

> scrolled past one unsupported set of statements, accepted them

And what tells you that they were not already aware of the evidence for those statements from prior knowledge? If so, then they would naturally only ask for evidence for the claims for they are not yet aware of the evidence. No need to re-ask for that.

Obviously I don't know whether they had such knowledge, but you seem to assume they didn't and are criticising them for this.

Because as much as you attempt to weasel around it, we're not talking about a spherical hypothetical in a void. We're talking about a specific event, for which no such evidence has been released.

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